TOM GABRIEL WARRIOR: 'CELTIC FROST At The End Was A Congregation Of Enemies'

Kim Kelly of BrooklynVegan recently conducted an interview with current TRIPTYKON and former HELLHAMMER/CELTIC FROST singer, guitarist, and main songwriter Tom Gabriel Warrior. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

BrooklynVegan: Do fans try to contact you and send you letters and things like that?

Tom: All the time, yeah. All the time. It happened in the old days and now with the Internet, of course, it happens even more. It's a very two-sided thing, of course, you're bound to only hear the good things which is very flattering, I get a lot of gifts, books, whatever, people read what I'm into and then they come up with gifts or just a compliment or, even if it's just discuss lyrics, it's fantastic. Of course, with the advent of the Internet, the other side has gotten a tool, a instrument to unleash their feelings, too, and the other side being, of course, people who hate what I'm doing or hate me as a person for some reason or another. You have to realize that I've created extreme music for 28 years. That also provokes extreme feelings and not all these extreme feelings are positively extreme. And there's a lot of people that have not met me for even a minute in their lives and yet they project something into me. It has reached a level, at times, which it's been difficult to deal with. I'm a person with emotions, too, and personal feelings and it doesn't go by me without any damage. On the Internet there's fake e mails of mine, there's fake events that I've supposedly done. It's really difficult to deal with that because people read and think they don't know what's true, what's not. They only have the information that they read and some of it will always stick and you as a real human being, with a real life later have to deal with that. And then you go there and you're basically already defending yourself even though you haven't been anything. You're saying, "Well, that's not true, I never wrote this, or I never said that, I never did this." And then you have people who will never believe you, who will always be skeptical. And that's also the reality of "fan interaction."

BrooklynVegan: That's true. People sometimes seem to forget that the musicians and bands they admire are human beings, are people, and so they put you on a strange pedestal or tear you apart and don't realize like there's a human being in there.

Tom: Well, one could say look, I chose this public life so I have to deal with it. It's a legitimate point of view, perhaps. But at the end of the day, you know, I'm a human being. And if I wouldn't have emotions and feelings I couldn't create music. I create very honest music; my music's always coming from my emotions. I never write out of routine or according to a formula. But having these emotions, being a man who has feelings, you can get hurt like everybody else who has emotions. I'm not superhuman. Like I said at the beginning, I'm a human being and it has become very difficult to deal with. It has reached a level, especially after the reunion of CELTIC FROST when I became much more public than I was years before that, it has reached a level where it becomes very difficult to deal with.

BrooklynVegan: Do you think it will every reach a level that it will make you not want to continue doing what you're doing?

Tom: It's come very close to it. There's just many solutions to this and complete withdrawal from anything public is one of them and I've toyed with this many times. It's not what I want to do, but I have to keep my emotional sanity at the end of the day. And I have to say my band has been a huge support in this. I probably would've taken some irrational decision long ago but my band has been an amazing support.

BrooklynVegan: It sounds like a really healthy environment for you to be in.

Tom: It's like day and night to what CELTIC FROST was at the end. And one thing that too, not to bash the former members of CELTIC FROST, everybody can do whatever they want in this planet, but the fact is it's very different to what CELTIC FROST is. CELTIC FROST at the end was a congregation of enemies and this is a congregation of friends.

BrooklynVegan: So now what are you going to be moving forward with in regards to your music? Is TRIPTYKON your main focus or are you going to be doing anything else on the side? It seems like the band is gathering a lot of steam.

Tom: TRIPTYKON is the focus of my life, absolutely. I know it's become much more commonplace nowadays that everybody's in like a million bands. I've never approached it like that. If you're going to do a band right and do if deeply, then you have to be in one band. If you want to do something really artistically on every level then you have to focus all your energy. So TRIPTYKON is that for me, that's my project and I do that. I'm doing some production work now and then, I might be working with a Norwegian band next year, we've been talking about it, it's probably too early to announce who it is. I enjoy producing albums but it's just a side thing.

BrooklynVegan: On the record, the production was really raw, but still kept a deep aura of darkness about the whole thing, it was the perfect production for what it was. I wanted to ask how you went about achieving that.

Tom: Well, it's because TRIPTYKON is a very open environment. I've worked with other bands from the studio, where they hired me specifically for that sound, and then I'm in the studio and I find that they're not open enough to achieve it. I'm telling them how to do it and then they're kind of scared to go that far. And that's fine. It's their prerogatives. But if you want to have the darkness there that you hear on a CELTIC FROST album or on a TRIPTYKON album, you have to go all the way, you have to actually listen to me. I know how to do this. But I cannot do it if you refuse it, if you resist it. Sometimes it takes a little bit of unconventional thinking, abandoning your established ways. It also takes something from ourselves. In TRIPTYKON, we formed a band to be daring, to be courageous, we're not afraid of experiments. And I've done a lot of other bands, unfortunately, are set in their ways. And then sometimes I find myself in the studio telling a band, "Well, why did you hire me if you're scared of going that far? You told me you wanted me exactly for that and then you're scared of going that far." But they hire me, they pay me, so I'll do what they want. If they want to use me to my fullest capabilities, fine. If not, that's also fine.

BrooklynVegan: Do you think people cared more about bands back then when you had to work for it and try really hard to find that one demo from Germany or Brazil when now, you can go online and have it in four minutes?

Tom: I don't know if you can care more for it. It's something I think about on both terms because I have experienced both eras. I think what's lost a little bit is the magic. Like I said, you had to go through a huge effort to get all, or even a single track back then. You heard from friends that this and this band was super extreme, that it was worth checking out and you couldn't just click and check it out. For us in Switzerland we have to go sometimes for weeks to any obscure record store in the country, of which there were many, and hope that these people might have ordered one copy of some obscure single from America or England and that you would be the first to discover it, that some other metal fan would not discover it before you. And you had to drive for miles and miles to get that, there was no online search, no nothing. So when you finally got that track in your hand it was something really magic, it was an achievement. And that magic is kind of lost nowadays because everything is at mouse click. On the other hand it's fantastic to have everything at mouse click and a lot of music that I missed back then because I could never find, I have found now and I have now. So how'd you rate which time was better? It's impossible to rate that. Both times, both eras have their positive points and negative points. I'm probably blessed to have experienced both, both eras. That's the good thing, but I can't really make a decision. I think it's terrible if some musician my age live in the past and say it was magic back then and it's not now because that's simply not true.

Read the entire interview fromBrooklynVegan.